Monday, October 5, 2009

Blood Psi STILL getting great reviews!


THERE'S a lovely review of mine and Keith Burns' Blood Psi one-shot in episode seven of the Small Press Big Mouth podcast. Reviewer Stacey Whittle , who also blogs for www.sfx.co.uk, describes the cover and interior art as "gorgeous" and says the story is "very satisfying" and kept her guessing right until the end.

The review starts at 17 minutes 20 seconds into the podcast and you can check it out here: http://castroller.com/podcasts/GeeksyndicatesPodcast/1209360

You should also take a look at the SPBM blog here: http://smallpressbigmouth.blogspot.com/

Blood Psi has been out for at least a couple of years now but a great review's a great review as far as I'm concerned.

Post-BICS



I HAD a blast at the BICS festival in Birmingham over the weekend, catching up with lots of friends, meeting some great new people and selling loads of comics. Septic Isle and BritForce were my top sellers, suggesting punters are more interested in a meaty graphic novel-length read these days than in flimsier pamphlet-style comics.

If anything, though, the event very much underlined to me that I've really taken the self-publishing lark about as far as I can. I simply don't have the money to kick on from here, especially since Diamond's increase in their minimum order benchmark makes it harder than ever for tiny indies like me to get into Previews. Nope, my decision to concentrate on my writing and slowly run down the publishing side of what I do is, I think, the only one that makes sense right now.

To that end, on the Saturday morning I met with one of the artists with whom I'm going to be pitching to companies and we agreed a way forward for our project. I'm really excited about working with this particular illustrator (whose identity will remain a secret for now) and about the project itself. The plan is to get the 'pitch package' ready to show to people at the Bristol Expo next May.

I also met a young artist called Matt Birks whose work is terrific (strong storytelling, great design sense) and I'm keen to collaborate with him on a pitch, too.

I probably won't stop publishing altogether at this stage - BritForce's creator Andy Radbourne is keen to do a second issue and I might do the odd thing to keep my hand in just to sell at cons. But I'm not sure right now whether I'll be exhibiting at Bristol and Birmingham next year or whether I shall just attend as a regular punter/aspiring writer. I have to say it would be very nice to go to a comics convention and not spend all weekend stood behind a table endlessly spouting the same sales pitches for my comics. It's given me a sore throat and aching legs this year...

Thursday, October 1, 2009

BICS bits

I'M off to Birmingham tomorrow for the British International Comics Show - or BICS as it's better known. I have a table there as usual and Brothers and BritForce will both be making their BICS debuts. These are going to be the last titles I publish for the timebeing as I'm going to be concentrating on pitching projects to other publishers instead of putting out my own stuff.

As far as that goes I have three outlines with artists right now and the plan is to get proper 'proposal packs' together to show editors and publishers next year. I'm keen that this stuff shouldn't be rushed as I want to make all of the proposals as slick and professional as possible. I've certainly found three terrific artists to work on them with me, one of whom I shall be meeting up with in Birmingham to discuss our collaboration in a bit more depth.

In the meantime, new stories will continue to appear from me on the Moonface website - Mongo, Music Critic is already up there and will be joined in due course by a couple of other tales, one of which will be drawn by my old Septic Isle collaborator Mick Trimble.

After a very lazy summer - the kids being around gave me an excuse to do bugger all on the writing front - I'm keen to really get back into things. I've done a fair bit of work on another story idea but need to retool it a bit, while another couple are at the 'very roughly sketched out in my head' stage. After BICS I have a couple of weeks off work and intend to use them to get some of this stuff up and running...